“Home. When it rains, you can smell the leaves in the forest and the sand. It's all so small and mild, the landscape surrounding the lake, so manageable. The leaves and the sand are so close, it's as if you might, if you wanted, pull them on over your head. And the lake always laps at the shore so gently, licking the hand you dip into it like a young dog, and the water is soft and shallow.”

“And Josh wanted to tell her what he knew: that love might look like a shore but turn out to be a desert island, where you roamed alone, talking to yourself, trying to crack open coconuts with your shoe. So thirsty you drank the salt water. So hungry you ate the sand.”

“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”

“You feel control drain away like sand falling from your fingertips. You can't hold onto it. It's gone. And so are you.”

“You can't leave footprints in the sands of time if you're sitting on your butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?”

“No lake so still but it has its wave.No circle so perfect but that it has its blur.I would change things for you if I could; As I can't you must take them as they are.”